With continuing development work, we find many improvements that may be made in such varied equipment as a nail gun, an earth drill, a space launcher, or an oil well drill using electromagnetic acceleration caused by electromagnetic interaction of magnetic rings around a body to be accelerated and a ringing circuit formed in a D.C. charged accelerator coil. Using a capacitor across inlet charging lines to the accelerator coil and a nano-second switch in one of the lines between the capacitor and charging source a ringing circuit is formed by opening said nano-second switch. A ringing circuit may be likened to an alternating current with frequency of the cycles being dependent upon the particular circuit. With one size of the accelerator coil, the frequency will be more rapid or there will be higher frequency as the capacity of the capacitor in the circuit is decreased. This allows us to arrange coils linearly and choose capacity of each capacitor so that the frequency of the ringing circuit increases to allow maximum propellant or accelerating force between magnetic rings on an object and magnetic forces created by the ringing circuit. Each magnetic ring on an object may be first "pulled" and then "pushed" by electromagnetic interaction with proper ring spacing and proper frequency in the ringing circuit.
There are several ways of forming magnetic rings around the cylindrical object to be accelerated. In one embodiment, conductive rings are formed around the body to be accelerated and a magnetic field is induced in the conductive rings by induction coils positioned close to the conductive rings when the body to be accelerated is held in a pre-acceleration chamber.
In other embodiments, a magnetic field is induced in a segmented ring wherein the segments are of dissimilar metals such as aluminum and nickle and junctions of the segments are alternately heated and cooled
We have considered all of the following patents:
______________________________________ Ser. No. Inventor Date ______________________________________ 4,817,494 Maymard Cowan 4/4/1989 4,796,511 Yehia M. Eyssa 1/10/1989 4,791,850 Michael A. Minovitch 12/20/1988 4,754,687 George A. Kemeny 7/5/1988 4,753,153 Louis J. Jasper, Jr. 6/28/1988 4,718,322 Emanual M. Honig, et al. 1/12/1988 4,714,003 George A. Kemeny 12/22/1989 ______________________________________
None of these make use of a ringing circuit caused by opening of a nano-second switch in charging lines to charge a coil with a capacitor connected across the charging lines between the coil and the nano-second switch. The strength of a magnetic field induced by lines of force is proportional to the change of the voltage with time so that we form a very strong magnetic field in this way. Since the ringing circuit gives an alternating current with a frequency determined by capacitance relative to coil size we may control the frequency as an object procedes through accelerator coils by changing the capacitance of the capacitor in the coil circuit. We may also increase magnetic field strength on one or more magnetic rings on the object to be accelerated. When more than one ring is used spacing of the rings is such as to give propellant "pull" and "push" by interaction of electromagnetic fields on the rings as they are propelled through the accelerator coils.
A further difference from any of these patents is that the object to be accelerated is held in a pre-accelerator chamber to form or induce magnetic fields in the rings. Further, in our invention in some applications the object may be propelled into the accelerator coils using a propellant such as gun powder, rocket fuel or compressed air and in some applications the magnetic field around the rings is produced initially by heating and cooling alternate junctions of dissimilar metals forming the ring. In the embodiment using dissimilar metal rings, the magnetic fields around the rings are increased using an induction coil connected with a nano-second switch that is opened as the magnetic rings pass into the center of induction coils as the object moves toward the accelerator coils. We have shown that additional field strength generated in this manner exists sufficiently long for acceleration.